Dr. Alan Weakley is a career-long botanist and conservation biologist firmly rooted in the southeast region of the U.S. For a little over 23 years, Dr. Weakley has served as the director of the UNC Chapel Hill Herbarium, which since 2000 has been part of the North Carolina Botanical Garden.

Throughout his career, from his PhD work to his professorial and director duties and community engagement work, Dr. Weakley’s focus has remained on the rich biodiversity of plants and plant community systems of the Southeast. In his experience, this is one clear way to work toward conserving biodiversity writ large.

An exhibit Dr. Weakley and the Herbarium helped to create, Saving our Savannahs, Stories of the Longleaf Pine, will be on display at the North Carolina Botanical Garden through December 2024. In our conversation, Alan describes the ongoing and ever-increasing importance of herbaria and the expansive collaborative relationship possible between the UNC-Chapel Hill Herbarium and North Carolina Botanical Garden now that they are fully integrated. One example of that is this new exhibit designed to engage and educate the public about this beloved ecosystem of the Southeast. 

As he poignantly notes: “At a time of a biodiversity crisis and the sixth great extinction, herbaria are really more important than ever. And provide more critical resource than ever before... We can only move forward with conserving the biodiversity of our rich region, if we know what that biodiversity it, if we know where it is, if we know how to manage it. Ultimately we’ll end up conserving biodiversity only if the people want to, only if we care about it."

In listening to the scope of Dr. Weakley’s work and recalling his early reference to his well-loved and well used book-form Peterson Field Guides as a younger person, it occurs to me that the legacy of his work (and others like him) is much like a trusted field guide we carry with us to know more about exactly where we are. Enjoy!

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